thanks to grandma you are finally one step closer to your dream of esports
domination she just gave you her old computer you
know the one she bought it seven years ago on clearance
but that's not important all that matters is you've got your valerian
invite and you are ready to tear up the battlefield there's just one small
problem your new computer
is really really slow so
it's time for a quick and uh
dirty upgrade on the cheap
brought to you by glassware instantly see your current and past network
activity detect malware and block
excuse me oh that's dusty and block badly behaving apps on your pc
or Android device use offer code lines to get 25 off glass wire at the link
below excuse me
it truly is a fantastic time to be a pc
gamer pretty much all the biggest games in the world right now can be enjoyed on
relatively attainable hardware and okay
your grandma might not be the type to bequeath you a pc
mine sure isn't but we specifically chose this machine because it is the
kind of thing that even if it wasn't given to them a student could obtain for
him or herself without spending a lot of money and we also saw a pretty
reasonable upgrade path for it so we went with the delightfully mediocre dell
optiplex 9010 a newer version of the classic gray dell tower of yesterday now
we'll poke around the insides we've got a core i7 3770 now that's not the
unlocked k variant but quite honestly you're not going to be
doing any overclocking on this dell special motherboard anyway two
four gig sticks of sk hynix uh pc3 1600
megahertz memory okay oh woof is that a
gt 640 graphics card oh that is nasty oh
wow this might actually use a standard power
supply moment of truth here we go
man i do not miss hard drives look at this even the images for the shortcuts on the
desktop take like 18 minutes to load in
let's start with something it should be able to handle let's play some legal legends huh
well i finally got in and now that i did dang it's running just fine look at that
150 170 FPS i always forget just how
easy it is to run this game hmm we're getting dips though i mean
that is sort of a function of this being
barely up to spec hardware i'm seeing some stutters as i'm panning the camera
around a little bit certainly better than i would expect any other modern
game to run on what was a bad video card you know seven eight years ago
and it's definitely playable i mean you're probably gonna you know you're probably gonna get ganked at some point
if i'm getting my terminology right because of a leg spike but
you know it is what it is all right so this game's running and
aside from some chug it's running pretty well it says that 1080p medium quality
finishing loading it needs a separate screen for finishing
loading that's how you know you're using a hard drive
all right let's go boys wow this is not as good an experience definitely running
at a lower frame rate now not to the point where i'd say it
interferes with my ability to play the game though like this is still a solid
you know 45 to 55 somewhere in that range FPS
it's usable one thing i haven't noticed is oh never mind there it goes okay it's
it's chugging it's struggling is that GPU's fan even spinning
oh yeah it's working okay oh oh there's a hero
wait i'm a hero are you a hero oh well there was another hero there he
was hiding how is the easy ai so smart
okay well anyway that's enough of that game wow it's really chugging we're
getting down as low as 30 plus FPS but those frame times you can really see
them spiking so just because you've got 30 FPS doesn't mean that you're actually
getting reasonable frame times and every time your frame times jump
that's when you feel like a leg or a or a spike or like a a stutter
um okay hey partner how are we doing here bud
oh we're not doing so good um neat
yeah and we're dead well that was quick what is this a shotgun oh is that bad
hey uh coltie buddy uh pal
what's up man uh how does valerie work oh lordy i died um how many rounds do i
have to play i i joined a server so i could benchmark a graphics card i'm
trying to quit and it's like hey you're harming the experience of the other players you shouldn't do that how long
do i have to play this for uh it could be upwards of 24 rounds
what yeah so it's whichever team gets to 13
first 13. yeah it's kind of crazy
i'm not playing 13 rounds what who's got time for this
yeah you could just i mean you know gamers but you could just leave i think
one of my teammates is already gone because they're just standing at the
spawn so could i could i guilt-free leave at that point
yeah you'd probably go for leave yeah okay cool i mean they're probably gone
because i'm terrible so it's still my fault
they gave up uh well you'll be fine with it all right thanks if anyone asks why i
bailed on the match i'ma let them know Colton said it's okay
for fun we're gonna try something a little more demanding we've got pubg
running at 1080p sort of because the render scale is
70 of 1080p and we've got everything
cranked to very low there we go whoa
okay that is not a lot of FPS and this is not a good looking game at
all low i can barely even tell where like the towns are
in fairness to the gt640 this looks terrible but is running relatively
smoothly run forward run
now there's a dated reference
why would you do that what's wrong with you
ow ow okay all right well there you have
it unsurprisingly almost all the games we tried were at least functional if we
were willing to sacrifice visual quality on our gt640 so if all you want to do is
play these games then go ahead and check out the ebay links
below and get out of here just just go
for it however if you were hoping to turn the details up to high or get a
smoother experience in the games because what we noticed was that even the ones
that were running at high FPS were stuttering and hitching a lot of the
time you're gonna wanna watch on step number
one is definitely for the sake of my sanity
to install a bloody SSD in this thing
let's get it shut down here going from a spinning disc to a
solid-state drive is a monumental improvement now a one terabyte SATA SSD
from a well-known brand is gonna run you about a hundred dollars these days but
if you don't need that much capacity which you might not and you're willing
to just kind of take a gamble there are some deals out there just make sure that
you grab something with a dram cache so for example the fatty dove racing 120
gig that we checked out recently that did turn out to have a dram cache only
cost us 20 bucks now in terms of uh
mounts well this case is pretty old it doesn't have two and a half inch mounts
but the good news is that ssds don't have any moving parts and we can just
chuck it there now for system memory eight gigs of RAM might be enough if all
you're going to do is play basic games with pretty much nothing running in the
background but a cheap brand name 16 gig
kit like this hyperx fury set that we had on hand will go a long way towards
running more demanding games and improving multitasking ebay craigslist
and facebook marketplace are all good places to find fantastic deals on ddr3
from people who are upgrading whether it's to ryzen or something from Intel
right now now we were lucky our cheapo
dell motherboard happens to have four memory slots so if all we wanted was 16
gigs of RAM we could just slot in two more four gig sticks and it's off to the
races but we don't have any matching memory and we
want the best chance at compatibility here so what we're going to do is what a
lot of people would have to do because they might end up with a motherboard that only has two slots on it is we're
going to take out what we've got and we're going to replace it with our new
RAM as for the gt640 graphics card in
here it's pretty tired in fairness to it
it was born tired as soon as you fire up something much more demanding than
league of legends you know it starts to struggle the good news though
is that the core i7 3770 CPU in here is
still a very competent gaming processor even
to this day so we can add a lot of
graphics muscle to this machine before our CPU becomes the bottleneck as long
as we stay within reason our GPU upgrade
ambitions are going to be somewhat limited by the 275 watt power supply
that's included with our system and while we could add a new power supply
especially with this system that does seem to use standard atx by the time we
add a power supply we're getting dangerously close to new system kind of
money and besides opening up that can of worms can
cause more problems than it solves even some proprietary motherboards that look
standard might have different pin outs or specialty connectors for example that
make them a hassle to deal with now we did go second hand for our memory and
that is totally an option for graphics something like a gtx 960 is a great
choice for under seventy dollars but
if we want to max out our machine without having to upgrade our power
supply the two GPU options for the most
FPS per power consumption are the gtx
1650 super so this one right here is 100
watts and starts at about 170
and the gtx 1660 ti this is 120 watts
and starts around the 250 mark now since both of these graphics cards
require external power and this power supply doesn't have pci express power
connectors we're going to use these SATA to six pin adapters
i know the saying molex to SATA lose all your data etc etc etc but either of
these cards is going to pull 75 watts from the pci express slot leaving less
than the 50 watts that the SATA connector can handle to be drawn over
the pci express cable so we should
be fine now i'm going to install the 1660 ti because the point of this video
is to show you guys with some choice upgrades what a machine like this can be
capable of but if you don't have the budget for that right now you can always
get something else for now and then pick up one of these later on down the line
once they fall in price another point by the way guys if you
don't have any extra power available or
you were only able to find one of those half-height desktops you do still have
an option the gtx 1650 has a low profile
variant this one's from zotac that does not require any external power making it
a simple drop-in upgrade and most of the time they'll include a low profile
bracket so you can install it in one of those slim towers now here we are half
an hour later and depending on what kind of deals you can scrounge the cost of a
game console or even less and we are ready to boot up our system with that
next-gen technology of solid state
man i can already tell how much more responsive this thing is just from
opening up control panels like resizing Windows it makes a big
difference let's kick it off with league of legends shall we
see how long this game takes to load on our SSD
wow i bet i could even have chrome open
in the background lttstore.com
get your water bottles here get your hoodies
the classic stealth hoodie processor t-shirt
wow we are right up against our FPS cap here
how about no FPS cap how about that what do you think of that all right hey
370 FPS and you can see as i'm scrolling around
here we're not getting those those jutters and stutters you can see that
it's nice and smooth even though i'm recording at only 30 FPS you can still
tell there's a marked difference wow those frame times three milliseconds
300 FPS in the loading screen now that shouldn't be that impressive but
compared to what we saw last time it is well that really is a lot better
we're ripping around on the map at what
250 frames per second it really is amazing how much game these old third
gen core i5s and i7s have in them even in modern titles like this
what a difference not only is it running way smoother like
you can just tell but we've actually turned the details up to medium so the
game looks a lot better as well view distance in particular in this game
makes a big difference to your potential success so the bottom line is you pair a
machine like this up with an inexpensive 120 or 144 hertz display and a decent
mouse and you're going to be clicking heads all day long in games like
valerian and cs go and even getting a pretty darn good experience in heavier
titles now the thing is this setup isn't going to make you a better gamer only
you can do that but as we explored an hour does FPS make
you a better gamer series it will make it easier for you to get better now even
if you don't go for the GPU upgrade for grandma's old rig i would still
recommend the SSD one just because it will make the experience that much
better as you're rising through the ranks and the lighter titles on a really
tight budget so if you guys like this video maybe hit that subscribe button to
see us upcycle an old laptop into a pretty snazzy home theater pc i don't
remember actually greenlighting that project nicholas but apparently we're
doing it now and we're also doing this segway to our
sponsor blinkist thank you for sponsoring today's video blinkist is the
app that takes the best insights and info from thousands of non-fiction books
and condenses them into just 15 minutes it's basically like speed reading
without the annoying learning to speed read part you can listen to audio
summaries or read them for yourself in a wide variety of categories such as
business finance parenting psychology and self-help or hey if you're a really
broken person maybe all of them they've even got full audio books that their
premium subscribers can get 65 off the retail price on and some of their most
popular titles include the ai economy which explains how the rise of
artificial intelligence will affect society so take a look at all of that
the first 100 people to go to blinkist.com LTT are going to get
unlimited access for a week to try it out so do that by clicking the link
below thanks for watching guys if you're looking for another fun video to watch
maybe check out uh the last season of scrapyard wars where i basically did
this to well i'm not going to spoil it for you
we're going to have that linked below